The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of information that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed during the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process your data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account will be created works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it's also considerably faster. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make numerous daily backups of the whole content in every single hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's significantly better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take significantly less space and they are generated faster, which allows us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.